Mankind Fails Again

What a week. An antisemitic Muslim socialist who awaits the 12th Imam, who he thinks will turn the world Muslim and make the rest of us dhimmis, is now the mayor of New York, a city so heavily identified with Jews that Jesse Jackson calls it “Hymietown.” A nut who said he wanted to put two bullets in the head of his GOP opponent and said his small children should also be killed is now the Attorney General of Virginia.

Here’s something I haven’t seen anyone talking about: if Republicans and Jews had voted for Andrew Cuomo, Zohran Mamdani would have lost. Hmm.

About 100,000 Jews voted for a man who is on the side of those who want to put an end to the Jewish state; their only lifeboat. The worst enemies of the Jewish people have always been Jewish, just as Christians have always been the most effective enemies of Yeshua.

As for conservatives, I think it’s fair to say we are seeing a powerful wave of antisemitism on the right. As a Babylon Bee sketch character said concerning the left, hating Jews is cool now. That is literally true in the mainstream left, and it is becoming true on the right.

It’s a shame Americans are so young. If the average age were 60, more of us would remember a more-normal, less-insane America, so we have the background to understand how deranged the populace has become.

The average age of a US citizen is 39. That is pretty young, in a world where a person who isn’t a total health idiot can expect to live to be over 80. A person who is 39 now was only 21 when the first Iphone was released and people started seeing the world through their phones and engaging with it with their thumbs.

About a third of us are 25 or under. They are generally like loaves of bread that haven’t been baked long enough. They have no idea how to look for the truth. Their morals are appalling. They get their news from random nuts on social media sites and also from the withering MSM, which is very dishonest and hostile concerning Christians, Jews, Israel, conservatives, men, and America itself.

The kids have no idea what a normal country looks like. They don’t see how America has changed, and they don’t realize how much healthier it used to be.

What is happening in the US parallels what is happening around the world, and it’s happening for the same reason. Israel’s allies are vanishing, we are moving toward a world that is almost universally antisemitic, and it’s because mankind rejected the Holy Spirit. The Jews claimed to accept Yahweh but rejected Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. Christians claimed to accept Yahweh and Yeshua but rejected the Holy Spirit.

To reject any part of the Trinity is to reject every part, and there will be a price to pay.

Only the Holy Spirit keeps people sane. If you’re not spending time with him every day, you can be made to believe anything. If you think Caitlyn Jenner is a woman and Donald Trump is a serial pedophile rapist, you’re listening to demons, and you are probably lost forever. If you think the pandemic was planned, you’re in the same boat.

We are seeing things that were not possible in 2000 America. Millions of us now admire a sick, disgusting boy named Nick Fuentes, who says he loves Hitler. If figures can be trusted, Candace Owens has over 7 million X followers. She repeats classic libels as though they were true, and self-described Christians tell her she is doing God’s work.

Not long ago, these two bigots would have been considered radioactive. No one would have given them platforms. Owens would be working in a cubicle somewhere, or she would be a liberal pundit who was careful not to step on Jewish toes. Fuentes would be working at Walmart. The guy the other employees didn’t want to sit with at lunch.

Someone who pays for ads is supporting these two. I guess antisemitism is now good business. Doesn’t that mean that someone somewhere was paid to do a survey asking people questions to find out whether it would bother them to see products associated with people like Owens? Advertisers don’t roll over in bed without a survey. Surveys are what got conservatives and gun enthusiasts demonetized on Youtube.

Americans must have have given responses that encouraged advertising companies to associate their clients’ products with hating Jews.

I’ll say what I always say: if it’s this bad now, what will it be like in 6 months?

The prophecies are coming true. I know people say Christians have been making apocalyptic pronouncements since the day after the crucifixion, but we live in a time like no other. For the first time, nations all over the globe are turning against the Jews, as the prophets said they would. It’s a new thing. The UN persecutes Israel. In 1948, the UN established Israel. The prophets say all the nations of the world will come against Jerusalem. That was never on the table until now.

The church is collapsing in the US. It collapsed a long time ago in Europe. There is no place on Earth that hasn’t been evangelized. Not China. Not India. Not Japan. Not the Muslim world. There is no nation that is a candidate for a future revival that will give Christians and Jews a refuge. America is going to abandon Christians and Jews, and then there will be nothing to prevent the prophecies from playing out.

Look for conservatives, including “evangelicals,” to adopt antisemitism as the dominant policy soon. I think three years will get it done.

I don’t think it would be hard to get J.D. Vance onto the wrong side, if he isn’t there already. He’s a Catholic who married a Hindu. Here is Christianity 101: don’t marry a pagan. Vance has zero revelation, he doesn’t know the Holy Spirit, and that means he is open to anything.

Maintream Americans weren’t like this in the past. Candace Owens isn’t the first nut to grab a microphone and squirm with rage while ranting against innocent Jews, but her support is unprecedented. So is Fuentes’. So is Tucker Carlson’s. Megyn Kelly is also turning a blind or at least severely astigmatic eye toward antisemitism.

No one should be surprised to see blatantly hateful and dishonest people win elections. It’s normal now. No one should be surprised to see uncloseted antisemites receive wealth and acclaim. No one should be surprised to see Jews help them and vote for them. Jews have been empowering their enemies since Genesis. For Christians, it has only been since Acts.

The World is Full of Tiny Models Who Never Need Rehab

I got all excited about photography yesterday, so today I went outside and tried to do some macro shots. Macro photography is photography involving little-bitty subjects like bugs and drops of water.

Back when I got my first DSLR, I gave macro a shot, and I got some photos I liked, but they were not amazing, and I did not keep up with it. I had an all-purpose 17-70mm Sigma zoom lens that happened to work okay for macro, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I don’t recall working hard to educate myself.

When I got married and had to think about family photos, I bought a nice full-frame Sony camera, and I kept my Sigma lens and replaced the camera instead. Probably a bad idea, since I was going to replace the lens anyway, and I suppose a new mirrorless Sony would have been smarter.

I liked the idea of having a lighter, smaller, much cheaper backup camera.

I upgraded to a 2017 Canon 200D, which, oddly, was much more advanced than the 350D I bought 20 years ago. Shouldn’t the numbers get higher, not lower? I also picked up a wide-angle lens for the Canon as well as a better macro lens.

I have a very good macro lens for the Sony, but I like the Canon because it’s way lighter.

I also got on-camera flashes, which you need for macro shots, and I also got a diffuser, which is a big fabric pancake thing that, aptly, diffuses flash light.

I did a little macro work, and if memory serves, it was all bad. I did some studying so I could improve, but I did not follow up.

Today I tried to refresh my meager macro education, and I got out there and took some photos. It went poorly.

The guy I looked to to get me up to speed is a Youtuber whose bag is macro. He said to shoot at ISO 200, use a shutter speed of 1/200, and use f8 for an aperture. He also gave some other tips.

I tried doing what he said. I put my diffuser on. I set my flash up the way he said to. I adjusted my camera to his liking, to the degree that its firmware would let me, and I looked for little things to shoot.

The first thing I went after was a peach blossom. It is probably under an inch from one end to the other. I will show you one of the better shots.

The focus is heinous. Some bits are almost sharp. The rest looks the way everything has looked to Keith Richards since 1962.

I didn’t do anything to that shot except cropping, resizing, and exporting to JPG.

I kept trying. There were some things I could not photograph at all. I’ll post the best shots I got. I cropped them and edited them with Affinity, which is a great program you don’t need a Ph.D. to operate. Forget Photoshop. Maybe it’s great for pros. I don’t know. Affinity is working better for me than Photoshop ever thought of working, and it’s free.

If you know anything at all about cameras, you can see that my depth of field was inadequate. There was no way to make it work. Focus on the bug’s head, and you lose the tail. Focus on the flower, and you miss the bug.

I kept fiddling with the lens, and then I came inside to see if I had anything I could save. You are looking at the best of it.

Here’s something interesting: the first guy has posted his work on the web. I just looked at it. The focus is awful. Half a bug in focus. The other end hazy. Apparently, he is not a very good photographer.

I found another Youtuber, and she made a video about people’s macro mistakes. High on the list: using a low f-stop.

Wow.

She says to go to f22 or f28 or whatever it takes to get the shot. She’s right. Her photos are very, very good.

So why does the other guy keep giving bad advice? I wonder if he needs to be fitted for glasses.

The lens I was using is a Sigma 70mm 1:2.8 DG Macro DG EX, and it’s supposed to be very good for macro, and not just because it has “Macro” in the name. The camera has 24 megapixels. It’s not the problem. The instruction is the problem.

I was going to take the Sony out next to see if I could do better, but I don’t think I will. I plan to use the Canon again and start out at F22, the highest setting. I think I’ll do much better.

I like macro for a lot of reasons.

1. There are probably millions of times as many macro subjects around us as ordinary subjects.

2. Macro subjects don’t cost anything. You don’t have to create backdrops or whatever. You definitely won’t have to pay bugs.

3. Macro subjects aren’t whiny and uncooperative, and they won’t call the police on you or beat you up, which could happen if you do street photos of other people.

4. Macro is perfect for introverts. You never have to accost anyone or ask permission. Or have any of that nasty old human interaction.

5. You can do a lot more macro shots in the time it takes to do ordinary shots. You can walk around your yard and take dozens in an hour.

I expect things to go well once I start doing what actually works.

Let Your Walls be Your Testimony to God’s Goodness

I thought I would post some good advice for anyone who wants to decorate the walls of a house.

You can spend big money for good art. You can spend less but too much on bad art your kids will throw out. You can make your own art, which is great if you have the ability. Another possibility: have your own photos blown up, and put them in nice frames.

Today I received a frame from Amazon, and now this photo is on our wall, 20″ wide.

We have other big photos on our wall. I have 4 photo posters that are 24″ high. Travel shots of the wife and me.

Ordinarily, I would not put a shot of my son on the web, but you can’t really make out his features from this photo of a photo.

I didn’t spend a ton on the frame. I got it from Amazon for $50. I could have spent maybe $150 at a frame place. This frame looks very good. The front is plastic, not glass, but I can always go buy a pane of glass if I want to. You would have to touch it to tell the difference.

I took the shot with my phone, and it’s a very good photo. It shows you can’t use limited equipment as an excuse not to try.

In 2023, before upgrading my cameras, I took a shot of a weed in my yard. I used my ancient (!) Canon 350D Rebel, which is about 20 years old. It would be easy for a photographer to convince himself it wasn’t possible to do anything worthwhile with that old 8-megapixel camera, but it’s not true. There are some things you can do with a given setup, and there are some things you can’t do, and many of the things you can do are well worth doing.

Below, you will see the photo I took. It’s an elephantopus carolinianus blossom (Carolina elephant’s foot). It’s a useless weed, and it’s ugly from a distance, but the flowers are really something. The flower is around 3/8″ across.

I blew the shot up so it’s 24″ high, and I ordered a frame to fit. I think it will look neat on an upstairs wall; a guest (or child’s) bedroom. Not the greatest photo on Earth, but very pleasant to look at, and it’s mine. I took it on my own land. If I croak, my family will feel bad about throwing it in a dumpster.

I need to spend more time using my better cameras. The baby interrupted just about every process in my life.

You’re Inadequate

Yesterday I wrote about a revelation God gave me: the 7 churches of the Revelation, though very important to Yeshua, did not have their own buildings. They were not big organizations like the Southern Baptists or the Catholic Church. There were no popes. They met in houses. The many people who now claim everyone has to belong to an organization and go to a building once a week are mistaken, unless Yeshua was mistaken.

He considered house churches important enough to feature them in an appearance that was to be recorded in the final book of the Bible. He didn’t say they were doing poorly because they didn’t have enough members. His criticisms never mentioned buildings or the sizes of their congregations. He didn’t tell them that if they pleased him, he would get them nice buildings.

Today, I’m thinking about this: John and the Apostles had no New Testament.

At some point, people started writing the gospels down, and the authors of the rest of the New Testament gradually produced the rest of the books. Before the New Testment was compiled and approved, the post-Yeshua scripture Christians had access to was very limited, if they had anything at all.

I should also add that Adam, Seth, Enoch, Methuselah, Noah, Job, Abraham, and Moses didn’t have the Old Testament. Neither did Melchizedek.

Bibles are very important, but you’re not supposed to be dependent on the Bible. You’re supposed to get to know God and have him live inside you so you learn from the Holy Spirit. If all the Bibles on Earth suddenly disappeared, would you be unable to continue in the faith? Would you be unable to evangelize and baptize? If so, you have a problem.

Sooner or later, you should start living more by revelation than by what you read, and the Bible should serve more as confirmation than teaching. You should reach the point where you know certain things because God told them to you, and then you see them confirmed when you remember or read the Bible.

If you can’t do what Christians are supposed to do without belonging to a church, going to church weekly, swallowing all the doctrine your church teaches without question, and reading the Bible all the time, you’re in a bad situation.

I always think about John, who told us we don’t need men to teach us. This is a passage preachers ignore. It’s a threat to their power, prestige, and wealth, and I think most of them don’t understand it and don’t believe it. Most preachers don’t actually believe what the Bible says. These days, Christianity is more like a philosophy than a religion.

Actually, it’s more of a business, and treating it like a philosophy is a way of offending fewer potential customers. Denominations are like the ad agencies that refuse to monetize Youtube videos they think might upset consumers.

If you want to see a preacher squirm, ask him about dinosaurs. Ask him about the flood. Most of them think Genesis is a fairy tale, so why are they Christians? Are they Christians at all? Can you say you believe in Yeshua, who called himself the word of God, when you dismiss the written word?

In 1 John 2, John, who was closer to Yeshua than the so-called pope, Peter, explained where heresy and apostasy come from. He wrote about “antichrists.” “Anti” means “instead of.” Antichrists teach doctrine they want you to accept instead of the truth. On the other hand, Yeshua is the truth.

John said that the difference between antichrists and God’s children was that God’s children hear from the Holy Spirit. Paul said the same thing when he said, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”

The Spirit is not a book, by the way. He’s not a set or rules, either, and he’s not a feeling. He’s a being.

In 1 John 2, John said:

Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.

“Unction” means “anointing.” Look it up.

As God has told me, all authority comes from spending time in the presence of God. Anointing is authority. Speaking in tongues, allowing the Holy Spirit to speak through you to Yahweh, is spending time in God’s presence. The Holy Spirit is God.

Did John literally mean we were omniscient? No. He meant we had the Holy Spirit to tell us everything we needed to know in order to succeed as children of God.

He uses the word “antichrists” to refer to nominal Christians who taught bad doctrine, including preachers. “They went out from us.”

The preachers who became antichrists became so because they didn’t spend time with the Holy Spirit, who would have kept them on course.

Later on, he said:

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.

Who is going to be ashamed at his coming? Yeshua told us.

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

The people who will be ashamed will be Christians and Jews who denied the Holy Spirit and trusted men, denominations, and their own crooked minds and hearts over him.

By “iniquity,” he means lawlessness. Christians are under the law. We’re under the law of the Holy Spirit. You can build a cathedral, feed the poor, house orphans, and do 15 pilgrimages to Assisi and still be disobedient and unsaved. You’re supposed to do what the Holy Spirit tells you to do. In person. Not just through a book. You’re not supposed to guess and say, “I think God would like it if I did this because it sounds virtuous.”

The other day, I got a fresh confirmation of this while studying the prophets with my wife. We were reading Jeremiah, and somehow we ended up looking at Ezekiel. Ezekiel described what was supposed to happen after the crucifixion. He agreed with John.

Of course he agreed. The Holy Spirit tells everyone the same things. There is never any disagreement. There is no such thing as “healthy debate.” It comes from separation from God. This is why God is a king who hates democracy, not a president.

God mixes things up in the Bible. For example, he addresses David when he is really talking about Yeshua. and he addresses the King of Tyre when he is really talking about Satan. He said the King of Tyre had been in the Garden of Eden, which is not true. In Acts 2, Peter referred to Psalm 16, which said David had ascended to heaven from hell, which was true of Yeshua, not David, who was still with Abraham.

In Ezekiel 36, God speaks to Israel, saying he will gather them and fill them with his spirit, but that never happened. He was talking to future believers, including Christians:

For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

He will put his Spirit in us and cause us to walk according to his laws, and we will be obedient. That is a reference to the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which was not available to Jews in the time of Ezekiel or any time prior to the events of Acts 2. It’s about all believers who are Spirit-led.

It’s a confirmation of what John said and what God told me.

He said the same thing in the 11th chapter:

Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord God; I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.

And they shall come thither, and they shall take away all the detestable things thereof and all the abominations thereof from thence.

And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh:

That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

Again, this never happened to the Jews. They continue in rebellion unto this day. They have lived in occupation, servitude, or exile. They are not united by the Holy Spirit, and they admit they have no prophets. Not one.

There are a lot of similar references in the Old Testament.

Look what Yeshua himself said in the book of John:

But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

The Spirit teaches us, and he also reminds us of what Yeshua said, including things that are now scripture, showing how the Holy Spirit is confirmed by the word.

I saw something funny the other day. A Christian named David Wood likes to debate Muslims. He is not Spirit-led, or he wouldn’t spend his life debating. He is a psychopath who tried to murder his father when he was young. Although he has accepted Yeshua and defends Christianity, he says he is still a psychopath.

He was criticizing a Muslim, and he used the Koran to do it. Apparently, there is a passage in there that says that a Christian or Jew who doesn’t accept the whole “book” (Bible), and who agrees instead with man who teaches against the word, that person worships a man.

That amused me, because it’s true. Satan wrote the Koran, but he had to put some truth in it in order to fool people. He included a truth most Christians would hate. It’s a truth that caused a lot of righteous people to be imprisoned, tortured, and burned alive by Catholics.

John told cautioned us against believing men, and he told us the Spirit would teach us, but preachers tell us to join a church, go every week, give us their money, and believe them instead of John. They tell us the Bible, all by itself, contains all the knowledge we will ever need, which is indisputably not true. If the Bible contains everything we need to know, why did James tell us to pray for wisdom? He could have said, “Look it up.”

Have you ever prayed for God to help you make a decision? If so, you were admitting the Bible doesn’t tell us everything we need to know. “Tell me whether I should move to this city.” “Help me choose a job offer.” “Is this woman the one for me?” The Bible doesn’t contain information like that, but the Holy Spirit knows. He’ll tell you anything you need to know. He’ll tell you what to have for lunch.

History is littered with Bible scholars who knew the Bible inside and out and were completely, catastrophically wrong about God, and who led millions to hell. Mormons read the Bible. Knowing the Bible will not get you everything you need.

The Bible is not enough, and it was never intended to be sufficient.

It’s wonderful to see Ezekiel and other Biblical authors confirm what John and the Holy Spirit told me. We search long and hard, trying to find the right path, and many of us find out late in life that we have wasted our existence on wrong beliefs. Knowing I’m on the right course is priceless.

It’s good to have the Holy Spirit on my side, because as the word says, who can be against me? He’s going to keep teaching me and looking after me. I should continue becoming less and less wretched from here on out.

You’re Building on the Wrong Rock

I just got the most interesting revelation, and like all revelation, it seemed obvious after I got it.

Christians love dragging “backslidden” Christians to church. By “backslidden,” I mean any Christian who doesn’t belong to a church or hand a lot of money over to a pastor or priest. They think anyone who is not a church member is “out of fellowship,” they see us as “lost sheep,” and they think we are deluded by pride and demons.

Here is a great question: why was there no big church building in Ephesus?

Don’t bother Googling. I did it for you. There was no big church building there until long after the apostles were dead.

I’ve been to Ephesus. It is decorated with symbols resembling 8-slice pizzas. Circles with several lines across them.

This type of symbol is called an ichthys, which is a word English stole from Greek. It means “fish.” Most of us are more familiar with the icthys we see on car trunks, but the pizza symbol is also an ichthys.

The symbol is supposed to stand for “Yeshua Moshiach, Son of God, Savior.” The lines represent letters.

When you walk through Ephesus, you see pizzas here and there, scratched into public structures. Why?

Ephesian Christians were afraid; that’s why.

The Ephesians of First Century Asia Minor were unpopular, like all true Christians. Christianity was new. Pagans hated Christians. Jews who rejected Yeshua hated Christians. It was dangerous to get together to celebrate Yeshua. As a result, Christians used pizza symbols to announce their presence, and they met in each other’s houses.

BOOM. God drops the mic again. Thank you, Lord.

Scroll forward to 2025, and somehow a Christian who worships Yeshua in his house is illegitimate! The people who are more like the Christians Yeshua decided to call a church in the Revelation are scallywags and truants.

Yes, Yeshua chose to mention cities with house churches, but he didn’t say anything about…Rome. Or Jerusalem, for that matter.

None of the seven cities had big church buildings. Look it up if you want to waste your time.

When God told me the age of the big church was over, he wasn’t talking about a church in decline. Not exactly. He was telling me about a new, better church that would meet in houses and locations of opportunity. It won’t take over the world, because Satan always gets the popular vote, but it is less corrupt by an order of magnitude.

If you meet in a house, you can exclude the people who need to be excluded. The glory hounds. The control freaks. The hypocrites. The denomination-worshipers. The pastor-worshipers. They ruin churches.

People think it’s about building a big tent. It’s not. Exclusion is important. Mindless inclusion is what destroyed the big churches. Go read about Gideon.

I love this. I love getting confirmation that I heard from God when people are trying to correct what he told me. It happens over and over and over.

Sorry. I Take That Back

The other day I wrote about a Christian friend who was mad at me. Another friend insists he’s not, but the texts suggest he is.

You can’t just ask a Christian if he’s mad at you, because they will always say no. You have to piece it together from clues.

You know how we are. “I’m going to pray for you” often means “I want to push your face in.”

He has invited me to a dinner function with other Christian men, on his dime. I accepted, but I was a little reluctant because of the timing and because of my many, many bad experiences with groups of self-identified Christians. Maybe I was rude, but I said I had to make something clear: I was never going to join a church again.

He said he knew that. Seemed a little annoyed, but I can’t really be sure.

I was afraid there was going to be an intervention. Let’s fix the backslider boy!

Some Christians evangelize for Yeshua, but most evangelize for churches. If you’re not going to church, you might as well be a crackhead who performs degrading services in exchange for small change. You have FALLEN AWAY, and they must go seek after the lost sheep.

Church Christians like to say we have to have “coverings.” If you don’t have a pastor, you have no covering, whatever that is. Like you’re doing an EVA without a spacesuit.

Coverings never worked for me. When I was a kid, I never saw a preacher who knew God or knew much of anything about him. They were able to dust off ancient notes and repeat sermons, and some were good at passing out communion and holding raffles and running church carnivals to raise money, but that was about it.

When I became an adult, things didn’t get much better. I had charismatic preachers, and they knew a few things about the Holy Spirit. That was helpful. They didn’t know they were supposed to pray in tongues a lot and receive revelation, however, so they mixed a lot of harmful excrement in with their teaching. Tithing, prosperity offerings, hard work, mindless submission to other human beings…the works.

They also discouraged talk of repentance. At my last church, there was a girl who kept coming in with new illegitimate babies, and they put her on the stage because she sang well. They never asked the obvious question: “When are you going to knock this off?”

The church before that was full of thieves, armed robbers, scammers, rappers, and strippers, and they were only too happy to put unrepentant people in ministry and hold them out as examples. I recall seeing one girl sing while her belly was so big it was like she was looking at the audience over the top of it.

Where there is no repentance, there is no salvation. That’s not me being self-righteous. That’s just how it is.

Most people have no idea what self-righteousness is. Giving useful criticism to others is not self-righteousness. We are required to do it. Yeshua did it and still does. The apostles did it. A self-righteous person doesn’t criticize himself. That’s the definition.

If I added up the hours I’ve spent criticizing myself and repenting this year alone, no one would believe me. God keeps waking me up at night.

Preachers think getting people into churches–their churches–is the most important thing in their lives. They also think that talking about repentance will keep butts out of seats, so they use “judge not” as an excuse to avoid it. They tell people God accepts they just as they are, which is not correct at all. They get lots of butts, but they’re the wrong butts. The wrong-butt people then end up running the church.

God eventually told me the church age was ending. Big churches had failed so catastrophically, he was giving up on them. This was necessary for a number of reasons I’m not going to get into now. God still wants us to assemble together, but you can do that in your backyard. Wherever two or more are gathered in his name, there he is among them.

When I tell people the church age is ending, they don’t like it. I think that must be because they are dependent on their churches, not the Holy Spirit. If they don’t go, they don’t feel God’s presence. They stop feeling clean. They feel like they’re not learning or improving.

It’s not supposed to work that way. You should bring God’s presence with you when you go to church. From your house. From your car. Otherwise, you’re showing up empty-handed.

The Holy Spirit should be with you wherever you are. If he’s not, something is wrong, and it’s disastrously wrong.

I hope they don’t try to drag me to churches. It would be nice to visit a church once in a while, but becoming a slave again and giving them over 10% of my income when I should be helping the poor instead…that will not happen unless I somehow become deranged.

I hope they don’t slander the Holy Spirit. If they ask me what’s happening in my walk, I will just tell them. God told me to stop going to church. God told me to stop tithing. God told me to pray in the Spirit a great deal. God told me preachers compete with the poor for money. God told me I had to do charity. God this and God that. I hope they don’t give me that, “Oh, another one,” grin and start talking about all the people who make up things God supposedly told them.

My friend belongs to the Assemblies of God. This outfit has produced a fair number of bad preachers. People like Swaggart and Bakker. It pushes the prosperity kickback scheme very, very hard. Trinity Church, my old church, was also an AG church.

I used to think the Assemblies of God was a charismatic church that promoted the Holy Spirit, but I found out that wasn’t true. They tell people to be baptized with the Spirit, and they get them started speaking in tongues, but then they stop. It’s like recruiting new soldiers and sending them straight from the recruiting station into battle. No weapons. No training. No communication with officers and instructors.

If you pray in tongues a lot, God WILL give you revelation, and you WILL have testimony. The vast majority of AG people don’t do it. They are there for prosperity, marriage, babies, healing, and the social life. And in many cases, money.

I figured most people in my church would be full of the Holy Spirit and that we would help others fill up. No such luck.

I would say AG people, and most people from charismatic churches, are just greedy Baptists who believe in miracles but don’t actually expect them. Not literally Baptists, but functionally similar. Nominal charismatics.

Nominal charismatics don’t have revelation or testimony, and they scoff at those who do. “I didn’t get it, so you’re not getting it, either.” They assume you’re lying or deceived when you talk about what God does for you.

This is how you can become a lifelong Christian who has never left a charismatic denomination and still end up slandering the Holy Spirit, living in defeat, being puffed up with pride like a bullfrog in mating season, and missing out on enormous blessings.

You can be a missionary, nurse the sick in a hospital in India, wash the feet of the homeless, preach with a bullhorn every day, memorize the whole Bible, smuggle Bibles into godless countries, drive the church bus, coach volleyball at Christian youth camp, lead the choir, compose hymns, and still have a lifestyle of slandering the Holy Spirit and thereby persecuting people who are doing better than you are.

Dormant, stunted charismatics who served churches instead of the Holy Spirit persecuted me at my last two churches. I didn’t have much trouble at all with unbelievers or the voodoo people who infest Miami. Preachers and volunteers made me miserable.

I joked to my friend about God telling me to buy my wife stuff, which is a privilege on both ends. He said Kenneth Copeland claimed God told him to buy his wife an $18 million mansion.

Was he slandering the Holy Spirit? I have to wonder. God really does tell me to buy my wife things. God tells Spirit-led Christians to do all kinds of things.

My wife lived in poverty until God joined us. She washed her clothes in a bucket. Much of the time, she had no hot water. She shared a hovel with two other women. She couldn’t afford to have a lost tooth replaced. To get up to the standard of a normal American women, she needs to be given some things other women here already have. Jewelry, shoes, clothing, medical care, and so on. She should be expected to require above-average expenditures until she levels up.

I’m not Kenneth Copeland. Copeland is a notorious fool and egomaniac who has lied for a living for decades. He’s a nasty person, and it is obvious his sick, worship-like covetousness didn’t come from God. Comparing the two of us would be absurd, and the absurdity is extremely obvious. You can’t miss it unless you want to. Surely my friend was not comparing me to him.

My sense is that he was trying to tell me I was claiming to have a relationship with God that I don’t really have. Like Copeland. If the Assemblies of God is what it should be, no AG member should be skeptical when another claims to hear from God. It should be disturbing when they say they don’t hear from him.

I have noticed that when we’re together, he keeps questioning my words, beliefs, and actions and asking me to defend myself as a Christian. I have never done that to him.

Maybe I’m wrong about the Copeland thing. Benefit of the doubt and so on.

My wife and I saw a funny video the other day. Maybe it wasn’t funny. Copeland had been given a Bentley. He was talking about it. He bowed his head and, in a reverent and highly emotional tone, said, “Ohhhhhhhh, thank you, Jesus!” He sounded like a junkie who had just recovered his stash of heroin after dropping it in a storm drain. It almost sounded sexual. He was overwhelmed with emotion. Over a car. A car no one told God to give him.

I dread going to the dinner for the same reason I avoid Christian forums. My concern is that I may be lectured and “corrected” by people who don’t know anything and who may be motivated by pride.

Christian forums are amazing. They’re like correction demolition derbies. Everyone wants to correct, and it’s not because they want to help or because they want others to avoid making the mistakes they’ve made. It’s because they have Smartest Boy in Class Syndrome. And most of what they say is wrong. Sometimes it ends with, “I’m going to pray for you!”, which, to many Christians, is synonymous with the middle finger.

A long time ago, I learned that I can’t help groups. I have managed to help individuals, but never groups. Satan works through groups.

My young friend Travis, who died in 2020 after a ghetto friend who was showing off a new gun shot him in the chest, thought he would save the black race. He was always mentoring kids. He thought he could save the ghetto, and he wanted to live there while he did it.

I told him that in 20 years, the people he knew would be exactly as they were at the time I was speaking to him. I told him that if he wanted to help, he needed to leave the ghetto and come back on weekends to reach a few people.

The same principle applies to Christians, generally. If you soak in their presence all the time, you will be distracted, misinformed, used, and persecuted. You need to spend a lot of time apart from them and avoid turning them into your consuming club. It’s better to be with a few people here and there.

I’m probably overly concerned. PTSD from past dealings with churches. Maybe I’ll have a great time.

My friend means well. I should appreciate it when people try to help.

One of the great things about my wife is that when I get a revelation that isn’t part of the church-worship belief structure, she never tries to correct me. She never accuses me. She never hands me a woke line in order shame me. She pipes up right away with a scripture confirming what I said, and then we have a discussion in which the Holy Spirit expands on it.

I have one person, on the entire planet, who listens with God’s ear and doesn’t fight with me.

This is a wife’s proper function. If your wife is constantly trying to correct you, or she’s always praying for God to correct you, one of you is married to the wrong person.

In any case, I am going to the dinner. Pray for me. And not in that, “I’m going to pray for you,” kind of way.

Not Every Tramp is a Tramp for the Lord

A friend of mine is mad at me.

I sent him and another friend a link to a Fox News story celebrating slutty Halloween costumes celebrities were wearing. I listed some types of familiar costumes. Slutty nurse. Slutty bride. Slutty vampire. You can finish the list.

He got mad and said I was using crass language, and he said I was using “slut” to “define women.” That’s a false accusation. On his part, I mean. If he meant I was trying to give women a label for the purpose of condemning them, he was wrong. If he meant I was defining actual sluts, meaning individuals who were bona fide sluts, well, okay, he was right. He mentioned the one true judge, meaning I was not entitled to call anyone a whore.

This is an important subject, because whorish women now have unprecedented power in America. We literally make them billionaires, and we make them co-parents by encouraging our kids to watch them and listen to them.

Back when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church, or maybe it was right after I left, Kim Kardashian visited. I was not present. The other armorbearers had to put her in a front-row seat and treat her like Yeshua himself. She was honored during the service, and afterward, “pastor” Rich Wilkerson went to the Internet to post a photo showing everyone that the goddess had visited HIS church, and he wrote, “What a great friend.”

Kim Kardashian is a slut. She is the most famous and powerful slut in America. Bigger than Madonna ever was. A slut is a woman with loose sexual morals and/or a woman who has many sexual partners.

She made a porn video and sold it on the web. Her co-star says her mother was in the room, directing the video. She has posed for Playboy. She has posed naked in other places. She has never repented.

This is what comes of misapplying “judge not” and bowing and scraping in order to put butts in church seats regardless of what kind of people the butts belong to.

Rich Wilkerson teaches tithing and giving extravagant offerings. If he can get a billionaire to join his trashy church, he can cash in like never before. I believe this is why he sucks up to rich people. He puts them in the green room behind the stage and fawns on them. I never saw a person in need treated like that at Trinity, but I did see him ask us to shoo them away.

As to my friend, I pointed out a few things, but I didn’t convince him. I’m not angry, but he pretty clearly is. I’m a little frustrated, but I’m not angry.

First of all, every word in the Bible can be attributed to every part of the Trinity. They are unified. If Yeshua or the Holy Spirit or Yahweh said it, or an anointed person said it while God spoke through him, it can be attributed to all three of them. Yeshua wrote the Ten Commandments, for example. It’s not like Yahweh wrote them and Yeshua said, “Wow, that seems pretty harsh to me.”

Also, I’m entitled to use any word an anointed person used, because as a Holy-Spirit-baptized Christian who listens to the the Holy Spirit, I am anointed. Anointing refers to authority. As long as I’m not out of line, and I have heard from the Holy Spirit, I have authority. It’s not like Paul is a general and I’m a private. We both answer directly to God.

With that in mind…

The word “whore” and synonyms and related words are all over the Bible, in both testaments, spoken and written by God himself as well as prophets and apostles. “Whorish woman.” “Whoring.” “Whoredom.” “Harlot.” “Whoremonger.”

It gets worse. God called Israel an ass in heat.

If you want to see something shocking, read Ezekiel 23:20. “Flesh” is a reference to private parts.

There is no point in referring to the Old Testament any further to prove “whore” is an acceptable and valuable term. Anyone who disputes the fact that “whore” and related terms are all over it is either lying or unfamiliar with the Bible. It’s like saying there are no mice in Disney cartoons.

As for the New Testament, which is where flesh-led Christians find a Yeshua who never judges and is basically a gay version of Buddha, well, hold onto your socks.

First Corinthians 6:15-16:

Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take

the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.

What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.

Ephesians 5:5:

For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

First Timothy 1:9-11:

Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,

For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;

According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.

Hebrews 11:31:

By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.

Rahab was an ancestor of Yeshua, and the Bible still calls her a whore, which she was at the time she helped the spies.

Hebrews 13:4:

Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

Revelation 17:1:

And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:

Revelation 17:15:

And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.

Revelation 17:16:

And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.

Revelation 19:2:

For true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.

Revelation 21:8:

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

Revelation 22:15:

For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

It is interesting that we are still “allowed” by the church to call murderers, thieves, liars, and other habitual sinners exactly what they are, and we can even say “adultery,” but we are not supposed to say “whore” or “pervert.”

Why is that? Satan shapes the language of the Spirit-denying church. He is using whores and perverts to destroy our connection to God, so he has banned terms that describe them accurately.

People claim words like “slut” and “whore” are derogatory in some special way, but that’s only because they describe people others find contemptible due to their behavior. The behavior made the terms distasteful. Call whores “sex workers” long enough, and “sex worker” will come to be considered offensive.

When I think about the way words fall into disapproval, I always think about “moron” and “imbecile,” which came to us from medicine. They were legitimate terms used to describe people with terrible problems. Naturally, they came to be used as insults. Then we were told to use another medical term: “retarded.” That became an insult. Then we were told to say “mentally challenged.” Soon after, I heard a kid ask another kid, “Are you challenged?”

When Yeshua called people fools, which he did several times in the Bible, he used a Greek word. The noun form is “more,” and it means an unintelligent person. It’s where “moron” comes from.

There is only so much you can do to make language pleasant to hear.

It’s not self-righteous to say “whore.” It’s self-righteous to say you are too good to say “whore.” John and Paul said it. Am I better than them?

Why do I not mention Yeshua, who used terms like “whore” in both testaments? Because my friend claimed only God had the right to say it. If John and Paul said it, and they were not out of line, then what he said isn’t true.

I don’t think my friend realized it, but unintentionally, he was implying he was better than I am because he doesn’t “judge.”

We are commanded to judge, by the way. Look at everything Yeshua said in the verse many Christians think constitutes the entire Bible:

Matthew 7:1-5:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

No one quotes the whole passage. Just the part Satan likes. He liked it when the ancient Jews were too hard on sinners, and now he likes it when we refuse to correct them. He’s like a good lawyer. He can work with any parameters and make an argument.

Look at this passage from Ezekiel 3:

Son of man, a watchman I have given thee to the house of Israel, and thou hast heard from My mouth a word, and hast warned them from Me.

In My saying to the wicked: Thou dost surely die; and thou hast not warned him, nor hast spoken to warn the wicked from his wicked way, so that he doth live; he — the wicked — in his iniquity dieth, and his blood from thy hand I require.

Has the Old Testament been set aside by God? Astonishingly, many Christians think so. In reality, it can’t be set aside. We are not required to abide by certain rules the Jews had to follow, but the word is eternal. After all, it is the word itself that tells us we don’t have to follow those rules. Only the word has the authority to do that.

The Holy Spirit will generally tell us to do what God told the Jews to do before us, and he definitely wants us to warn people about sin and iniquity. How else are they supposed to know?

I showed my wife the conversation with my friend, and she expressed the same wonderment I do.

She has a niece. The niece hangs around drunk in bars. She has three small children by three men. At least one of the men is married. She makes her mother raise the kids. She leaves them for days at a time. She shows no signs of stopping. What are we supposed to call her? A great friend?

You’re not supposed to go outside with a megaphone and tell prostitutes, “YOU’RE ALL WHORES, AND YOU’RE GOING TO HELL, UNLIKE ME.” But you are supposed to call people what they are. It wakes them up, if they are willing, and it can turn them from destruction and help them live in God’s love every day.

I think my friend is a wonderful guy. He used to smuggle Bibles for Brother Andrew. He is kind and warm-hearted. He wants to please God. But I think he needs to get closer to the Holy Spirit.

It seems like he never has a testimony, and I have never heard him share revelation.

If you’re spending a lot of time with God every day, praying in tongues and bathing in the Spirit, you will have revelation every single day of your life. It won’t be something you saw Ray Comfort or the pope saying on TV. It will be something God told you directly. It may conflict with your church’s doctrine, and it may even seem to conflict with the Bible at first, but when you open the Bible and look, especially at the Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew, you will see that there is no conflict.

If you spend time with God, you will also have all sorts of testimony.

The other day, I opened a dish in the microwave, and hot steam shot out onto my thumb. It kept hurting after it cooled off. I commanded the burn to go, and I commanded my flesh to be healed, and I asked God to back me up. The burn left, and within the hour, I was as though I had not been burned. That’s an example of testimony. I have lots of testimony. So does my wife. Hers is more amazing than mine. It’s not because we’re super-righteous. We are definitely not. It’s because we have spent time in the Spirit.

If you’re not spending time with God, how can you call him your father?

We are taught to be church-worshipers, which means man-worshipers. We know we’re not all that holy, so we go to church to listen to the really holy guys and give them money. We have the really holy guys pray for us instead of praying for each other, because we have no faith in our own prayers. We accept the doctrine the really holy guys teach us, as though they were God. After all, they have the big hats, the fancy cathedrals, the TV cameras, and the jets.

Then we find out they’re homosexuals and even homosexual predators. We find out they sleep with women they are supposed to lead. We learn that they made things up in order to get power and money. We find out we wasted our lives, displeasing God by following their false doctrine.

A church-worshipers are predictable. They get very angry when you question their denomination and their favorite preachers, as though doing so were blasphemy. They repeat certain bits of false doctrine predictably. Things like “judge not.” They may tell you it’s a sin to have a single drink; a lot of them do that, but it’s a lie, as Yeshua might tell you with a cup in his hand.

Often, they try to be holier than God himself. This usually manifests in niceness. God isn’t always nice, though. He killed nearly the entire human race once, and he is coming around for another pass soon. He is extremely blunt and open about sexual matters and toilet functions. He’s not a Victorian prude, running around putting skirts on table legs so they don’t give men impure thoughts.

God gave me a wonderful word once, and it suprised me. He said it in my own voice, directed to himself. He said, “I am not better than you.” To be clear, he was telling me I am not better than he is.

It sounds strange and obvious at first, but it’s very powerful.

Satan and his children are always claiming to be better than Christians and better than Yahweh. They’re nicer, they tell us. Of course, they are really angry and dangerous, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole. They tell us they love everyone. They tell us they’re superior because they don’t eat animals. They tell us sexual sin is virtuous and beneficial. They call whores “sex workers” because it sounds like a job, not like whoring and being enslaved by pimps.

When we refuse to judge, we are telling God we are better than he is. We are doing what Satan’s children do. What the “judge not” passage really means is that we have to judge ourselves first, fairly and honestly, before we judge other people and try to help them change.

Yeshua judged. All the writers of the New Testament judged. All the prophets judged. David judged in the Psalms. We are not better than God.

My friend is a church Christian. That’s why he doesn’t have revelation or testimony. He is doing his best to do what he has been taught by men. This is probably why his family has been destroyed and he has been separated from his wife and kids, although they might have abandoned him if he had done everything right. They have free will. It’s definitely why things aren’t getting better for him and why people are still abusing him and getting away with it.

I judge myself constantly. I keep asking God what I’m doing wrong to cause chronic problems, and I ask him to help me to stop, show me what to do to fix it, and help me to do the things that will turn the situation around. He told me to ask these things…because I spend time in the Spirit and receive revelation.

The ancient Jews also asked for correction when they were in trouble. They never said, “Well, we’re having a famine, so it must be because we’re the special, chosen, righteous people, and we’re doing everything right.” They fasted. They tore their clothes. They put ashes on their heads. They went to prophets and priests and asked them the same questions I asked, and what did God do? He answered them, and when they heeded his words, God fixed their problems.

When I didn’t spend time in the Spirit, I was ignorant, and I lived in defeat and depression. That’s not a mysterious aberration. That’s how life is supposed to work. You’re not supposed to be blessed if you shun the Holy Spirit. It’s not proof God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care about you. It’s evidence that his word is true.

I wasn’t a “good person” to whom “bad things” happened. God wasn’t testing me. He wasn’t showing me his greatness through my habitual, degrading defeats. He wasn’t teaching me to be strong. I get sick of hearing Christians claim failure is really victory. I wasn’t a martyr. I was just a loser, because I wasn’t connected to the person who gives us victory.

We need to quit asking God why bad things happen to good people. We need to quit promoting a dangerous lie. We need to ask what we’re doing wrong.

Just this morning, God gave me a relevant word: “Thank you for humbling correction.”

As for Halloween, I am glad it’s behind me and all the witches have gone home from their meetings where they cursed you and me and Israel and Donald Trump and Yeshua himself. I’m very glad I live behind a gate so no one gets to knock on my door and ask me why I don’t have candy for little children dressed like demons and vampires.

And sluts.

Can’t Get to the Parking Lot Fast Enough

For a long time, I’ve been telling people competitive sports are incompatible with Christianity. In America, this is like saying God himself is evil, because American men almost literally worship athletes, and the sports industry is their church. It makes people very angry. It really upsets the guys who have the mistaken impression that football is a great tool for building good Christians.

It is true, however. Our sick, deranged obsession with sports comes to us from the Greeks. They also exalted athletes and even treated them as gods after their victories. The Greeks were not Christians. This should be obvious. They worshiped childish false gods and decorated their front yards with statues featuring permanent erections, and they considered these statues sacred, not unlike the bizarre nudes found in many Catholic churches.

Today I got some wonderful confirmation.

I dreamed I was back in prep school. I was in history class. My teacher was Mr. Thomas. He taught me in ninth grade. Now that I think about it, he was the football coach.

Mr. Thomas was not a very nice guy. He wasn’t extremely abusive, but he was an angry leftist, and he was a little bit of a bully. Example: students complained that he kneed football players because he didn’t believe they were wearing protection.

I just realized how odd it was that he was a sports coach. He was about 5’7″ and maybe 260.

In the dream, I had already graduated from high school and college. For some reason, I was repeating high school.

You can imagine how much interest I had in my second tour. I didn’t need another high school diploma, so I had no reason to do any work or show up at school.

Mr. Thomas had given us a novel to read. It was about a Revolutionary War hero. Fiction. He had told us to write term papers about it. Odd, but this was a dream.

The paper was due the next day. I had done nothing whatsoever. I felt I had to do something by the next day in order to avoid failing. That was all I cared about. I was not interested in writing a good paper. I just didn’t want to be yelled at.

I was in the classroom with the other students, but Mr. Thomas was not there. He was late. I decided to take the time to use my laptop to see if I could learn anything about the guy in the book.

I searched the web very quickly. I made the mouse fly. I went to site after site. I made a lot of typing errors, so I went to sites that were not helpful. One site had something to do with sex. It showed a realistic cartoon lady who was wearing a short transparent nightgown with nothing underneath, and she was evidently familiar with a practice attributed to people from Brazil.

Somehow, my classmates were able to see what I was doing on a huge display. I told them I had gone to the dirty website by accident. In case they were wondering.

At my school, we had an unwritten rule, and the rule was that if a teacher was late, we could leave after a certain amount of time. I think it was 20 minutes. We got tired of waiting for Mr. Thomas.

A security guard came in. He was dressed more or less like a cop. He was a nice guy. A little nerdy. Glasses and a short beard. He wore an old-fashioned police hat.

We told him what was going on, and he told us to go home.

I was thrilled. Best news I could have asked for. I got up to leave.

My desk was like an elementary school desk in that it had a lid on hinges. It was bigger, of course. I opened it and saw that it was full of my belongings. I couldn’t take them home in one load.

By now, the guard had turned into a custodian. He wore a grey shirt with his name on the left breast pocket. Somehow I knew his name was Zeke. Ezekiel.

I asked Zeke if he or someone else would be around to let me into the room later to get my stuff. He said someone would be there.

I didn’t expect to return. I wondered if Mr. Thomas was dead. I guess he is, now.

When I woke up, I didn’t know whether the dream meant anything or not, so I prayed for revelation.

What is high school for? It prepares you for employment, and if you’re ambitious, it prepares you for self-exaltation in a prestigious, lucrative occupation. My school always sent a big percentage of students to Ivy League and Ivy-League-adjacent schools, and a lot of them went on to make big money.

In the dream, I had no ambition at all. Why would I? I didn’t need money, and the thought of getting a job and having to work was horrifying to me, as returning to prison would horrify an ex-con. This is my attitude in real life, as it should be. God has, with extraordinary generosity and patience, given me an easy life. Also, I know from past experience that no matter where I work, I will be blackballed, cheated, robbed, and undermined. Satan runs that world. It even happened to me at church. It’s part of Satan’s world.

The purpose of the dream was to get me thinking about ambition and to confirm that my attitude toward it was a gift from God.

I went to the Bible and the web to look around.

God expressly condemns ambition in many verses. I was relieved to see that.

Let’s start with Galatians 5. Look it up, and you will see that selfish ambition is a work of the flesh. The Greek word for it is eritheia.

Before you hit the keyboard and tell me that wanting to be a preacher or something similar is not a selfish ambition, let me point out that it very often is. Preaching is a great job. It can make you a millionaire, and you never have to do anything right. You can keep teaching things that don’t work, and when your victims complain that their lives aren’t getting better, you just tell them they’re not doing it right, or you say it’s an attack of the devil, and they will keep giving you money. This even works if you are caught in a motel room with a prostitute after getting another preacher removed from the pulpit for adultery.

Priests are often ambitious. Same for cardinals. Popes are often glory hounds; look at Francis. It’s not just a Protestant problem.

At Trinity Church in Miami, there was a young man called Chino. After I left Trinity and moved on to a church called New Dawn, Chino visited. He had decided to become a preacher.

He delivered a sermon which got people very stirred up. I thought it was pretty bad. Other people were cheering and clapping.

After the service, a friend of mine told me he had heard a preacher named Jabin Chavez recite the same sermon, nearly word-for-word.

Chino had been indoctrinated by a prosperity church run by a con artist with a family made up largely of con artists. He saw that the preacher lived in a mansion on Golden Beach with a yacht tied up out back. He saw a chance to get his own mansion, so he stole a sermon.

I only single Chino out because I don’t want to type dozens of similar stories, which I could easily do.

What does this have to do with sports? It should be obvious.

Sports are driven by ambition. They’re also driven by gambling, but on a personal level, they are driven by personal ambition.

In sick America, athletes get crazy favor. They get sex with all sorts of very attractive girls and women who won’t have anything to do with non-athletes. They get a grotesque amount of admiration. They get scholarships. They get good grades without doing their own work. They get all sorts of wealth. When they’re young, they get cars and paychecks for no-show jobs. They get bribes from colleges. They end up with free college degrees. Some become professionals and make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The police turn a blind eye to their violent crimes. It’s a cushy existence.

Don’t tell me there is no personal ambition in team sports. If you want your team to do well, great, but you wouldn’t be playing if it didn’t benefit you.

The word eritheia can be used to describe a lot of things. Selfish ambition. Strife. Rivalry. Factionalism. It has been used to describe people who campaign for political office. It describes doing a job purely for mercenary reasons.

Competitive sports promote all of these things. It’s about exalting yourself and abasing others. It’s about division. You or your team against the other guy or guys.

What happens at an athletic event? One person or team leaves in celebration, with memories that will bring them joy all the days of their lives. The other leaves in painful disgrace. Don’t let anyone tell you different. No one goes home thinking, “I played the game ethically. That makes me a winner.” That never happens.

Losers regret their losses all their lives. They fear losing. Many athletes throw up before competitions. Many beat their wives and girlfriends when they lose. They suffer depression. They are often condemned by teammates, relatives, coaches, and fans. These days, “goat” is used to mean “Greatest Of All Time,” but it originally meant an athlete who caused a loss.

If you win an Olympic gold medal, you may go on to extremely lucrative endorsements and appearances. If you win a silver, you end up teaching gym to high school students. Then you spend the rest of your life watching the gold medal people, wishing you weren’t a loser. Blaming yourself. Wondering what you could have done differently. Reliving moments when you made bad choices.

These principles apply to all types of competition. Shooting for a promotion your coworkers also want. Winning an election. Competing with another business. Ambition is divisive.

Don’t tell me we should apply these principles to Christianity, too, because Yeshua said he came to divide. Not true. Yeshua came to divide wrong-thinking people from the righteous. He didn’t come to pit the righteous against the righteous.

Romans 2 says God will render to every man according to his deeds:

To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life:

But unto them that are contentious [eritheias], and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath,

Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile

Second Corinthians 12:20:

For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would, and that I shall be found unto you such as ye would not: lest there be debates, envyings, wraths, strifes [eritheiai], backbitings, whisperings, swellings, tumults

From the list of works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20:

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife [eritheia], seditions, heresies. . .

Philippians 1:16-17:

The one preach Christ of contention [eritheia], not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds:

But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.

Philippians 2:3-5:

Let nothing be done through strife [eritheia] or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus

If you want to see more references, click on this link to a reference site.

It all makes sense. What was the iniquity that got Lucifer expelled from heaven? Ambition. He wanted to compete with God, not because he thought God was wrong and wanted to save others from God, but because he wanted power and admiration.

Ambition is self-exaltation, and God hates self-exaltation. There are endless verses that show this. Here is one: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

To be ambitious is to keep yourself under a curse and make God himself fight you. If you’re a parent, it can destroy your descendants. My dad’s ambition helped destroy my sister, and it harmed me greatly.

Proper Christians don’t compete. They build each other up.

God has shown me how important it is to know your place and love it. I should be glad I get to submit to God. My wife should be glad wives have to submit to husbands. My son should be glad he has to submit to God and his parents.

There are people who have more than I do. Well, God bless them. They generally work hard, which I do not, and they provide all sorts of benefits. Inventions. Products. Helpful services. I wouldn’t trade places with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Much of the current strife in the world is based on ambition; the desire to elevate oneself above one’s proper place and take that which belongs rightly to others. The vicious people who set cities on fire and topple statues are motivated by ambition. They want what better people have, but they want to remain children and, at heart, murderers and criminals.

Ambition does great harm in the church. Ambitious Christians attack and take down Christians who want to do the right things and spread the truth. They amplify their own voices and smother the voices of better people.

The ambitious do the work of their father. They can wear robes and miters, and they can start big TV ministries and claim they brought millions of people to salvation, but they belong to Satan, and they do what he would do if he were in their shoes.

I’m very happy I had this dream. It means I’m doing better than I thought, and it will help me to avoid catastrophic decisions in the future. It will also help me protect my son from catastrophe when he is old enough to listen to me.

I hope this dream is about the rapture. I concern myself all the time with practical matters. How should I deal with wealth in order to make sure my wife and son always have more than enough? What should I do about various business affairs I loathe working on? What will I do about health insurance next year? Where can I find a good contractor to fix minor issues with the house? I hate this stuff. I would be great to be take out of this world with my brothers and sisters so I can let it all go, like the junk in the drawer in my dream.

Making the Effortless Impossible

I’ve been having an interesting day with my Chinese Alibaba-grade excavator, an AGT QK16R.

The last time I used it, I saw a long trail of oil behind it, and I realized this was not right, even for a Chinese machine. I parked it and fiddled with it. I thought the oil was coming from the slew motor. This is the motor that turns the excavator without moving the tracks.

Slew motor leaks are common with these machines because a lot of Chinese workers don’t believe in using wrenches. My motor is held in by 4 M8 cap bolts with lock washers. A lot of people find that these bolts are loose from the factory. This makes the motors wobble around.

There are also 4 bolts on the underside of the motor itself, and they have been known to leave the factory loose. My understanding is that when these bolts are loose, the O-ring in the motor gets torn up and causes a leak.

I found out the size of the O-ring: 138. Don’t take my word for it, because I haven’t installed one yet. I got some O-rings.

Today I got into the excavator. It is an amazing piece of machinery. I don’t mean that in a good way.

To get to the slew motor, you have to take off the floor plate. Easy, right?

I removed every bolt that held the floor on, and of course, all sorts of stuff was still in the way. The pedestal with the controls, mainly.

I learned some things that may help others.

1. Do not try to take off the lower sheet metal. AGT puts welded nuts on the upper sheet metal, where you don’t really need them, and it uses loose nylocks for the lower sheet metal. They are very, very hard to get at for loosening and tightening. Welding nuts to the inside of the excavator would be a good mod.

2. Removing the upper sheet metal is not hard, but it is tedious. You have to take out 8 screws and nuts, plus two bolts, to remove the door in front of the engine. The 8 screws are in hinges which don’t work because AGT made it impossible for the door to swing. A clever guy tapped the pins out of his hinges and replaced them with R-clips. I plan to do that, although Velcro would probably work just as well.

3. You should remove the foot pedal in order to get the floor off. It is held on by one oddly-chosen screw with a nylock.

4. You will have to remove the lower canopy support which is bolted to the frame. The bolts that hold it on go through the floor for no good reason. I am going to turn the holes into slots so I can loosen the bolts and lift the floor up instead of removing the support. The support is not needed to hold the canopy up, because the canopy bars in the rear are mounted solidly to the excavator frame.

5. One guy recommends cutting off the bit of the floor to the right of the control pedestal. It doesn’t really need to be connected to the rest of the floor. It can be reinstalled after cutting it. Some minor mods could be added to make everything stiffer.

6. Another guy recommends cutting the floor in two big pieces, front and rear.

7. When you get the engine door off, you get access to the front oil dipstick. This machine has two dipstick holes, front and rear, and AGT puts the dipstick in the front one where you have to take the excavator apart to get at it. The holes are interchangeable, so while the door is off, swap the plug at the rear of the engine for the dipstick in front. Now you can check your oil.

It turned out my slew motor was just fine, sort of. The bolts were not very tight, but the motor was not loose. I pulled the bolts out, applied Loctite, and reinstalled them. I don’t know the actual torque figure, so I went with a Chinese measure: yu wei tai nau.

I am going to pull it and check the bolts on the underside. I don’t want to put the excavator together and then have the motor fail.

The hydraulic fluid was coming from a valve thing (hydraulic swivel joint?) that feeds the track motors. When I looked at it, without even checking, I thought it looked weird. One one side, there were three screw-on fittings, and one was clearly farther from the motor than the others, suggesting it wasn’t tightened all the way. I fired the machine up, moved the tracks, and saw oil dripping out of the fitting.

Now I have to tighten that fitting. I wondered how I would do it, because access is nearly nonexistent. It’s under another fitting which I can reach, but I can’t get to the leaky fitting itself. I realized I could remove the top fitting, tighten the leaky one, and reinstall the top one, so that’s what I’ll do.

I checked whatever I could reach to make sure nothing else would come undone, but I can’t get at everything without a ton of work, so I plan to put the excavator together and hope for the best. I’m glad nothing was damaged.

The moral here is: tighten everything you can on your Chinese excavator. Also, change the hydraulic fluid before you run it, and don’t be afraid to modify it. You really are smarter than the engineers who designed it.

This info ought to be very helpful to people with the exact same excavator, and it should be somewhat helpful to people with similar models.

I Better not See a Bro Stache on Him This Year

I expected my son to grow up gradually, but it seems like he changes in sudden jumps.

Maybe 6 weeks ago, we got him a push walker because he was standing and holding onto furniture. We thought a walker would help him learn to walk. A push walker is sort of like a lawnmower. Babies stand behind them. They don’t sit in them.

He started standing and grabbing it right away, but he could not figure out how to move it around. He kept pulling it backward onto himself. He banged his head on it. I put padding on it to keep him from getting bruised.

He wasn’t able to push it around, but it has a panel with a bunch of toys on it, and he loved using those.

Last night, I was lying in bed looking at my phone, and I heard a noise. I looked down, and I saw his funny little head smiling up at me from beside the bed. He had pushed the walker across the room and into the bed.

I was amazed. It happened very suddenly.

He pushed it all over the bedroom last night. He loves it. It’s very easy for him. He holds the top bar with one hand and takes off. He acts like he has been doing it for months.

He will be walking in a week or so. I am sure of it. He has tons of strength, and he can stand up and squat without support. I’ve only seen him stand unsupported once, and it was only for a few seconds, but he is changing fast. What he’s doing with the walker is very close to walking.

We had to buy him a bunch of toys because we realized he was bored. He was chewing on charging cables and playing with anything we left within his reach. We got him a little plastic table with toys in it, and we also got him a plastic fire truck and a little toy TV remote that plays songs and so on.

He loves all of this stuff. He has learned how to use the table toys, and he spends a lot of time playing with them. There may be one toy he’s not using; I’m not sure. He sucks on the remote and pushes the buttons. He takes the parts out of fire truck and throws them around.

Now he has moved to a new stage, so we have to figure out what else to get him. I don’t even know what babies play with, so I am researching.

I don’t believe giving kids things spoils them. I believe teaching them not to appreciate things spoils them. It’s important to give kids anything they can make good use of. Where would we be if the great pianists hadn’t had good pianos when they were little more than toddlers?

My dad made good money, but my parents deprived me in comparison to the kids who lived around us. My sister and I had toys, but not many. I actually received hand-me-down toys from my best friend. I should have been given music lessons and good instruments as soon as I could benefit from them. My dad should have bought me equipment and taken me hunting and fishing. He and my mother should have shown me how to use science and engineering toys. I should have been taught to use tools. We should have traveled to Europe and Israel instead of taking cheap trips to Kentucky over and over.

It’s sad that I was encouraged to write. My parents and my teachers let me down with that advice. As a hobby and a way to communicate with people you care about, writing is fine, but anyone who encourages his child to do it for a living is extremely foolish. I should have been helped along with STEM pursuits. I would have had a bunch of patents by the time I was 30.

Toys aren’t luxuries. For kids, play is work. It’s their job. It builds capable adults.

We should also get something better than a stroller to use for walks. I don’t know anything about babies, so strollers were the only things that occurred to me when we had to move him around. There must be other things, like wagons. I’m looking into it.

We like taking mile-long walks on our private road, so we need something that will work well for that.

This boy is in such a hurry. We need to enjoy him the way he is while we can.

Bad Ideas go to the Burn Pile

Oh, boy. I feel like a runaway slave.

I managed to bust out and get some things done. Jobs that have been weighing on me and making me feel trapped.

I have lost a bunch of oil seals lately. Utility cart rear axle. Excavator slew motor. Tractor front axle. Even my car is leaking around the oil sensor.

I finally took my tractor’s axle apart and replaced a seal and two bearings. I have been thirsting for the day when I could use the tractor again, and it has come.

I am moving more rocks out of my yard. I have some buried rocks and boulders that get in the way of the mower, and I also have–had–a big flowerbed surrounded by irregular native rocks placed there by the guy who built the house. In addition to all this, he and his wife dumped more native rocks in random places as decorations. He put a bunch of them in places where there should have been grass. I couldn’t mow over them, and they sheltered weeds.

Some people think there is nothing nicer than a bunch of crude rocks surrounding a flowerbed or a walk. I disagree. Pavers and curbs always, always look better. They do a better job of containing things. They make regular borders between things. It’s easy to get close to them while mowing without hitting them. It’s easy to clean them up with a weedeater.

An oval of irregular rocks in your yard says, “I am cheap and lacking in good taste and common sense.”

A natural rock formation can look nice, but decorating your yard with obvious landscaping debris is tacky and doesn’t fool anyone.

Putting these rocks around the flowerbed was extremely unwise. It looked bad, and it caused lots of problems. We have a neighbor who has flowerbeds with pavers, and his yard looks spectacular.

Today I put the bucket on the tractor and rammed it into the rocks surrounding the big flowerbed, dislodging them so I could move them. Some went right into the bucket. Most, I had to put there myself. There were a few big ones weighing up to, perhaps, 150 pounds. There were dozens of smaller ones ranging from maybe 100 pounds to the size of a golf ball.

The big ones, I rolled into the bucket. The smaller ones, I picked up and threw. In maybe 90 minutes, I must have moved over a ton. I wanted to do more, but it was getting dark.

I’m so grateful to God for my energy. I am too lazy to do serious exercise, but I had no problem yanking rocks out of the ground and getting them into the bucket. I worked fast. My heart rate was elevated. I was sweating. I didn’t die or anything. I felt great.

I have prayed for God to keep me going so I can be here on Earth for my wife and son. I got so used to envying Christians who died and left this place, I think I started to welcome death. I apologized to God and repented. I don’t like Earth, but I am eager to sacrifice in order to be with my loved ones and help them.

I won’t pretend my motivation is completely altruistic. I want to be with them. I would hate to find myself leaving them prematurely. I want to see him grow up, and I want him to know me.

I think God has graciously agreed to help me, in spite of my wickedness and selfishness.

I told my wife to keep my son away from me for a couple of minutes so I could drink something and get it together, but he just ran in, stood up beside my chair, and started clawing at my shirt while screaming with joy. Then he speed-crawled away. Now he’s back.

He seems to have the same kind of energy I have. God’s joy, I believe.

She came and got him. I have to get up and join him in playing with his toys in a minute.

I’m sure there are still rocks out there. I’ll have to take a pitchfork and sift through the dirt to get rid of the ones I missed. After that, I’ll be able to mow over the flowerbed every week to kill weeds and puree the dead leaves.

I have hit rocks by the flowerbed with mowers several times. The rock border was formed so irregularly, I could not guess where it ended.

My theory is that the original owner and his wife told their kids, “Take the rocks we’ve found in the yard and pile them up around those two oaks by the driveway! It will be a fun project!” Then the kids moved a couple of huge rocks there, realized they wanted to be doing something else, and started using smaller and smaller rocks and arranging them with a sloppiness that increased with time.

Then the wife planted a magnolia between the oaks, which were about 7 feet apart, leaving me no choice but to rip it out after I moved here.

My wife and I have decided to make this place our own and abandon all reverence for the original owners’ ideas. I used to give them deference, thinking they had to know things I didn’t know, but over time, I have realized they made lots of dumb decisions I need to undo.

I plan to leave the flowerbed alone so grass covers it. It’s in the shade, in a place where oak leaves fall and kill things. It would take a ton of work to keep it up and make anything grow.

They also left a huge, sick oak in the middle of the driveway island. I had to cut that and get rid of it after it snapped 30 feet up. Next to it, there was a dense shrub about three feet high, encircling a scraggly dwarf magnolia that looked like it had tuberculosis. You don’t plant a tree inside a shrub. Is this not obvious?

A few weeks back, I tore out the shrub and the magnolia. Of course, there were also two ugly rocks, which I removed. I am thinking of making a proper flowerbed there with pavers around it. I’ll fill it with mulch and put some kind of attractive low-maintenance tree in the middle. Maybe a peach tree or a crape myrtle. Around here, the crape myrtle is the go-to answer to poor soil and hostile bugs and weeds. It’s not the greatest tree, but it thrives, and it doesn’t need much care.

No one should ever buy a dwarf magnolia. They always look like the tree Charlie Brown brought to school for the Christmas play.

I also had a magnolia about 15 inches from my expensive brick front walk. That was not a smart choice. You never put a tree close to a house unless you like buying new roofs, siding, pavement, and ceilings.

I murdered that magnolia, too, and I’m also going to murder the two rows of boxwoods that line the walk. Boxwoods always look like they’re dying, and you shouldn’t use shrubs to wall a walk in and get in the way.

I have other boxwoods, and they will die soon. I also killed some kind of scraggly tree beside the workshop. It got in the way when I mowed, and it looked awful.

I bought a flail mower, and I finally assembled it. I have a couple of things left to do to make it work better. Then the boxwoods will meet its spinning blades and become sawdust.

This property will never make Architectural Digest, but I should be able to make it presentable and arrange things so taking care of it doesn’t break my back.

I killed the original owner’s wife’s roses a long time ago. Roses always look terrible unless they receive perfect care and pruning, and they were in a bad location. I’ve killed many of her plants.

She put hideous, enormous bromeliads near the front door. I paid a friends’ kids to do some weeding, and they tore them out because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s fine by me, because I think bromeliads look sort of evil.

I had a very satisfying time with the tractor. I can’t wait to see this place looking better.

Cut Out the Middleman While You Still Can

I feel like I was put on this earth to tell people to pray in tongues.

The benefits are so great they are beyond understanding, and the price of refusing can include things like loss of salvation and eternal damnation.

One of the things I love about praying in tongues is that it brings revelation. When I find myself praying in tongues for a very long period, I get excited, because I know God is about to teach me things.

If God isn’t teaching you things, you are likely to slide into beliefs and practices that will cost you salvation and put you at the mercy of evil people and spirits.

Hosea said:

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

Hosea lived in a time when most people had to rely on scripture and special people who heard from God in order to receive knowledge, but that isn’t true today. By allowing the crucifixion, Yeshua made it possible for every believer to be filled with the Holy Spirit and hear directly from God. See what he said in John 16:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

John later informed us that the Holy Spirit, not men, was to be our teacher. Obviously, we have to hear from men to some degree, or most of us would never know anything about God. John was a man, and I am going to quote him. But men can’t be your primary source of knowledge, because they make mistakes and they also lie.

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.

This is interesting to me, because God told me that all authority comes from time spent with God, and all peace comes from authority.

Men who don’t hear the Holy Spirit hear every other spirit that shows up, and they repeat made-up doctrine that comes from those spirits. What can you say about these spirits? That they have no authority. If they contradict God, they contradict the highest authority.

To abide in God, as John tells us to do, we have to spend time with him. When you pray in tongues, you are spending time with God. As Paul says, when you speak in an unknown tongue, you speak to God, and he builds you up.

If you pray in tongues, you spend time with God. If you spend time with God, he teaches you from the position of complete authority. When you repeat what he tells you, you have authority and you are correct.

When you listen to men who don’t know God, you end up repeating unauthorized garbage that comes from demons. “Pray to dead people.” “The pope is infallible.” “Give money to me, and God will make you rich.” “You have to obey the dietary laws.” “God commands Christians to tithe.”

I have believed wrong doctrine propagated by preachers who listened to demons, but God has always shown me that they were wrong and helped me to escape the snares. I kept praying in tongues, and revelation came to me over time. As the word says, though I stumbled, I was not utterly cast down, because God upheld me with his hand.

The Holy Spirit was my compass. I was able to deviate from the course due to misinformation, but when I consulted the compass, I returned to the proper heading. When I got back on track, it wasn’t because I was smart. I was completely fooled before God corrected me. I thought Kenneth Copeland was a great preacher. I gave money to Robert Tilton.

I exchanged some emails with Robert Morris, because his teaching impressed me. How’s that for a confession? He has turned out to be a gigantic disappointment, not because he was sexually involved with a 12-year-old, although that’s not exactly inspiring, but because of the way he handled the consequences. He threatened the victim. He was even too greedy to pay her a modest amount of money, which is remarkable, considering his income.

He wrote, “My attorney advises that if I pay you any money under a threat of exposure, you could be criminally prosecuted and Debbie and I do not want that.”

Those are shameless lies. You can’t be prosecuted for extortion if the victim doesn’t press charges.

He is currently suing his church for millions. He wants over one million up front. Then he expects $800,000 per year until he hits 70, and after that, $600,000 per year as long as he or his wife lives. If he is suing for that kind of money, he was making similar money, or better, before the scandal broke.

That’s $4.8 million for the first 6 years, and assuming one spouse makes it to 84, $9 million more. Add the initial payout, and you get something like $15 million. He expects this from the church he built but also crippled.

The victim asked for $50,000, so what was that to the Morrises? Two weeks’ pay?

Was he ever the real thing, or did he steal his material from other people and make money from it? Does absolutely every charismatic preacher have to turn out to be a heartless, avaricious crook?

Ambition is the enemy of the Holy Spirit. It seems like every famous preacher is ambitious.

I don’t see him winning his case. The church claims there is a morality clause in his contract, and a jury is not likely to want to help him.

If I had sat around listening to men and never questioning them, I would be in big trouble today. I might be a Catholic. I might still be a prosperity Christian. I might be an atheist.

One of the sad things about my experience is that some of the worst preachers who taught me lies were baptized with the Holy Spirit and had the ability to pray in tongues. They just didn’t exercise it. They were trying to impress God. They were too busy for God! Can’t talk now, God! I have to build a bigger church! I have to go look at a jet!

They had time to network and copy sermons, but they didn’t have time to pray in tongues, be with the person who loves them more than anyone else ever will, and listen.

I have no doubt that you can be baptized with the Spirit, be given the ability to pray in tongues, and then go to hell. You can always go to hell if you want to, regardless of whether you accepted salvation in the past.

If God leads you to water, you better drink if you want to live. God has called the world “a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”

This morning I was praying in tongues, and I started thinking about the filthiness of my life and things I still needed to clean up. As long as you’re not like Yeshua, there is cleaning to be done.

I thought about all the sleazy, disgusting things I had done and said in the past. I think I would rather be flogged every day for a month than have the whole world watch my life on a screen.

Things are much, much better than they used to be. I used to be fatherless, so I acted like a fatherless kid, disgracing myself daily. Now I am improving. I disgrace myself less frequently.

I keep asking God to raise my wife and me all over again, and he is doing it. I’m not good, but at least I’m not what I was, and I will keep getting better.

I was given a great revelation yesterday. A long time ago, God told me all my problems were caused by lack of prayer. Yesterday, he showed me the other way of looking at it: all my problems can be solved by prayer. That’s a big motivator.

I had a revelation this morning, and here it is: if God won’t let me have something in heaven, why would I want to have it on Earth?

Example: if God won’t let me watch a movie in heaven, why would I show it in my living room?

An awful lot of things fit that description. I still have some movie DVD’s somewhere. I am going to dig them up and throw them away. I’m not sure I should dump The Ten Commandments, but I probably will. I will dump Casablanca, which is my favorite movie.

The entertainment industry was created to destroy me and my children, so why cooperate with it?

I should throw out some books. I’m not sure what I have left that could cause problems.

When I was young, I read books by fools like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Ernest Hemingway, and Fritz Perls. Real excrement. Did me a lot of harm. Those people are all in hell. I loved Hunter Thompson. He’s in hell, too, and he has dragged a lot of intelligent people down with his wake. He was a monumental buffoon.

People think only children need to be protected from bad influences. If that’s true, why are adults joining Antifa and trying to hurt the police? Why are there conservative Christian adults who don’t support Israel and who think Jews cause all the world’s problems?

It’s not true at all. If adults weren’t impressionable, there would be no advertising industry and no campaign consultants.

If I had started praying in tongues at 5, I would not have been damaged by filthy books and entertainment or by bad preachers. There was no one to teach me, however. They were too busy telling us to worship the pope or whatever.

My own mother, who was not Catholic, taught me to pray to Saint Anthony when I needed help finding things, and I did it. I hope Saint Anthony was saved, but I know he can’t hear anyone’s prayers.

If people had paid any attention to the Holy Spirit throughout history, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel wouldn’t be covered with paintings of naked people. If you think about it, it’s insane that anyone ever thought that was a good idea.

Imagine going to Yeshua today and saying, “We’re building a new sanctuary for you, and we’re planning on covering the ceiling with paintings of naked people.”

How do you think that would go over with him?

I wonder how many Catholics enjoyed that ceiling for the wrong reasons back in the days before pornography. I wonder how many sodomites enjoyed the paintings of men. People who remained in perversion because their church didn’t know how to deliver them. Like a huge percentage of current priests and cardinals.

If you like naked art in churches, enjoy it now, because God will eventually destroy it.

I believe God would now tell you this: “As you turn away from earthly culture, turn to me.” Don’t just give things up. Pick up better things.

I hope this is helpful and that you use it successfully to avoid my mistakes.

Local Smith Prices Herself Out of Business

I am wiped out from installing a new dishwasher. It should have been pretty fast, but like most quick, easy jobs, it had complications.

I bought a Bosch dishwasher to replace a Bosch dishwasher in the same series, and of course, Bosch changed the inlet fitting and did not include a threaded elbow to connect to it. I went to the local Ace, and unfortunately, the person who helped me was a friendly and earnest young man who hasn’t learned everything about the hardware business yet.

We could not find the elbow, which was confusing to me because I knew it had to be a common part. Bosch equals Thermador equals Whirlpool and so on these days. He sent me home with a couple of parts to screw together as a substitute, and I had to locate the correct part on the web, go back to Ace, and show them the SKU.

I did an excellent job of installing it because a) I am capable of doing simple things well, and b) I actually care about the quality of my work, which may not have been the case with the guys Lowe’s wanted to send for $217.

I may want to adjust the dishwasher’s position in the sagittal plane by 3/32″ or so, but that can wait.

If you need a dishwasher right now, jump on one of these Bosches while they’re on sale.

I’m still waiting for something else I ordered. You will never guess. Yes, it’s a rifle.

Four or 5 years back, I bought a Thompson Center Venture bolt action rifle in .204 Ruger. I thought I was going to shoot a lot of varmints. So far, that has not been the case. I also hoped to use it for target shooting to improve my shooting without spending money on pricier ammo.

Until just now, I thought it was a Venture Predator, but it turns out it’s just a Venture. I believe “Predator” means “with a green plastic stock.”

We live in amazing times. Fifty years ago, which was the 1970’s, believe it or not old people, a rifle that shot maybe 5 minutes of angle (about 5.25″ at 100 yards) was considered very accurate. Now, any bolt rifle that doesn’t shoot 1.5 MOA is considered lame, and you can walk into any sporting goods store and choose from a selection of 1-MOA rifles.

I chose the Thompson Center partly because it came with a 1-MOA guarantee. Three shots at 100 yards. Based on photos of targets I shot back then with cheap Fiocchi ammo, it looks like the gun came through, although I also shot some bad groups. That guarantee was pretty clever, because any gun will eventually shoot one three-shot 1-MOA group if you keep trying.

I wasn’t ecstatic about the trigger, so I looked for options, and there were none. Sadly, TC was not doing well, and its guns were not all that popular. In fact, it was going out of business, even though it belonged to Smith & Wesson. I don’t recall how that worked.

TC has been bought by the guy who sold it to S&W, but I don’t think they’ve actually made any new guns. Will they ever start? Who knows?

If you buy a popular gun like a Remington or Tikka, you will be able to find a lot of aftermarket triggers for it. I suppose no trigger maker thought it was a good idea to spend time and money on a trigger for an unpopular gun, however.

I put a lighter spring on it, and that was about all I could do.

Flash forward to a year or two ago. Suddenly I had a silencer. I wanted to get back to shooting. But two bolt guns I wanted to shoot did not have threaded barrels: the TC and a Tikka T3x.

By the way, the Tikka IS a 1-MOA gun, with factory ammo and no excuses. I managed to shoot a few rounds to zero it. It seems like it always rained when I started shooting for accuracy, so I have had a lot of sessions cut short. Anyway, even the zeroing shots, made while I was turning scope screws, looked very good.

I’ll post photo of a target I shot with “garbage” Sellier & Bellot ammo. This is a modestly-priced deer rifle on a modestly-priced bipod, shooting cheap ammunition. I shot these rounds while still adjusting the scope. There is one flyer which was probably caused by me shooting one round and then cranking the screws, and then there are at least 6 rounds that are 1 MOA or extremely close to it.

Checking my blog history, I see that I went indoors because I wanted to see if the scope was loose, not because of rain. When I shot another target with different ammo, the point of impact changed in a way that didn’t make sense to me. And target above was shot at both 50 and 100 yards. I shot one round at 50. It was very low. I adjusted the scope and shot two rounds into the same hole. Then I backed up to 100 and shot pretty much into the same POI. I was confused, because the 50-yard POI was essentially the same as the 100-yard POI. I didn’t understand how flat the gun shot at these distances.

That S&B FMJ 6.5 Creedmoor is nothing to sneeze at, at least at 100 yards. I bought a ton of it. It shoots great in the Tikka and also in my RPR.

If the domestic enemies of Christ finally started their war and I somehow found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to go out with the militia nuts and fend off guerrilla murder squads in floral print dresses, I would be able to do what was necessary over and over while they were too far away to see me without binoculars.

I think I paid $16.00 per box when I bought them one at a time, and I didn’t buy most of mine one at a time.

Of course, I have zero interest in participating in a civil war. If it weren’t for my family, I think I would prefer being among the early casualties than staying here and treating demonized jerks like paper targets. The word says David was a bloody man. I have no desire to follow suit. I would rather be a man of love.

So anyway, I had the Tikka and the TC, and they were not threaded.

I looked into having them threaded. In spite of living in a huge 2A area, I could not find anyone close to me who would do it, and I really did not want to do it myself. Most machining is easy, but barrels are not made to fit in the usual lathe tooling, and they are hard to remove from actions. Also, it’s easy to mar them up, and aligning them in lathes so the bullets won’t hit the silencers later is more complex than you would think.

I found someone in the next county, and she wanted $195-$275, which is insane. I paid $450 for the TC.

I let it go, but recently I learned something that changed the picture. Silencer Central now offers mail-in threading for $165, including muzzle protectors. The price is lower if you ship two barrels at once. The shipping is about $40 whether you send one or two.

Great. I am sold. It’s fantastic news. I’m sending the Tikka in, because even though it is not a high-priced rifle, it is 100% worth it. But the Thompson Center?

I can’t get a trigger for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get fun-level accuracy out of it. Thompson Center has been bought and reanimated, but there is no guarantee they will provide warranty service or that they’ll exist next year.

It looks like a quagmire to me.

I figure I can sell it for $350, so that’s $350 I can put toward something else. That something else is a Ruger American Predator in the same caliber. I want the same caliber because I have a boatload of ammunition, and I still think the .204 Ruger has potential.

It has a light, fluted barrel. The metal bits are Cerakoted. It’s threaded. It has a pretty good trigger out of the box. There are lots of aftermarket parts for it, including Timney triggers. It will probably shoot 1 MOA the day I bring it home. Lots of guys are getting that kind of performance in other calibers.

I’m sold. I don’t need any more hassle.

I’m getting the rifle plus a Timney. I’ll take the scope off my TC and put it on the Ruger. Done deal.

Now I have to ask: is it really necessary for two different companies to put “Predator” in the names of their guns? It sounds kind of silly. AMERICAN HE-MAN HAIRY-CHESTED CARNIVORE PREDATOR!

Yes, I am a predator. I have killed more fish than red tide, and I have managed to make a tiny dent in the hunting realm by murdering squirrels. And I eat hamburgers. But come on. You can call the gun something a little less steroidy-sounding, and I will still buy it. I mean, I did.

It bugs me that people call the Tikka, the Ruger, and the TC budget guns. Why do they do that? I guess you get more refinement in guns costing two or three times as much, and you get walnut instead of plastic, but I feel like any quality gun should be respected. If a gun can hit rats repeatedly at 100 yards, it is durable, and it is pleasant to shoot, calling it a budget gun sounds a little snobby.

I think the Tikka ran me $950 or so. Budget? Really?

The TC may not be long for my armory, but it seems very well made to me. All the machining is neat and tidy. It’s actually pretty tight because of the tolerances.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with .204 Ruger. It’s kind of a novelty round. I like it because it’s modern, with modern ballistics something like .223 can’t match, but on the other hand, .223 is more powerful, and it can hit anything I am likely to shoot at. It’s just as accurate, even if it doesn’t shoot as flat. I could blow through my .204 ammo and then rebarrel.

I have another .204 rifle besides the TC, so putting a .223 barrel on the TC would not deprive me of the ability to shoot .204 well even if I sold the TC.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the new rifle. It just bugged me that the TC had so many issues.

It should be here soon. I hope I actually use it.

Comforting Art From a Long-Lost Place

I have two exciting deliveries coming today. A new dishwasher and a less-than-mediocre art print.

My Bosch dishwasher left production in 2016, if the web’s guess is correct. I have had it for 9 years, and it may have been here almost 6 years when I arrived. A web source thinks it became available at around the start of 2012.

My dishwasher is not smart. I can’t communicate with it at all. No app. No wifi. No Bluetooth. But it did function for somewhere between 9 and 15 years with only a moderate amount of trouble.

I had to replace the front door panel containing the handle once. There is no latch. You just pull until it gives up. The part you pull on is around 3/16″ thick on each side, plastic, with no reinforcement. It eventually gave way because it was stupidly designed, and I had to spend about $80 on a new panel.

I got some special JB Weld for plastics, and before I installed the new panel, I shot the problem areas full. Now it has the strongest Bosch dishwasher door handle on Earth.

It also leaked a couple of times. I could not figure out why. I was going to tear into it, and then the leaking stopped.

It leaked again recently, and it refused to repair itself, so I took to AI to figure out what was wrong. I had to keep correcting Grok, and eventually it led me to a couple of likely parts. One cost $20, so I ordered it and replaced it.

Installing it should have been an easy job, but I had to lie on the floor on my face and turn a hex fitting 1/16 of a turn at a time, and there were other issues. Bosch could have made it much easier by using some brains. The order of installation operations caused the problem. It’s much easier to remove the hose from the part if the part is out, but you have to remove the hose in order to take the part out. That kind of thing. Stupid.

It still leaked, so I looked into the other part. It was a pump, it was discontinued, it would have cost something like $250 if I had been able to find it, and replacing it would have been a very unpleasant job. I would have had to turn the dishwasher upside down, and there was no guarantee the new part would fix the issue.

I could have called a repairman and blown a hundred bucks or so to be told I was wrong, but I was almost certainly right, and other parts would have been replaced, so I would have been out maybe $200 at the least, and I would have still had an old machine with a vanishing parts supply.

I found a successor model on sale at Lowe’s for $400 off for no clear reason, so I jumped on that. They wanted $217 for installation, which I did not jump on. It’s two screws, two tubes, and a cord. I need to open a dishwasher installation business and charge $150 per trip.

I went with Bosch in spite of the stupid bits. Basically, the machine has impressed me. It worked well, and working on it was surprisingly easy for the most part. And the parts are not terribly expensive. It looks like they gave it parts support for a reasonable amount of time. Could have been better, but I have seen worse. And getting over 40% off the price was a deal I could not miss out on.

Oh, boy. Here comes the truck.

I’m paying them $50 to haul off the old machine. I could do that myself, but in a time when a visit to Cracker Barrel costs over $30, $50 seems cheap for what I’m getting.

It’s here. Life can now go on. We can cook again.

I know I’m spoiled, but if the dishwasher quits, it means I can’t cook. It doesn’t mean I can cook and wash dishes by hand. No.

My other package is a Nellie Meadows print.

Nellie Meadows was an artist from Clay City, Kentucky. My grandfather owned a lot of land in her area. Was she a great artist? No. Was she a good artist? Mmmm…no. Let’s be honest. I would say that she was not quite good enough to make it as a commercial artist drawing new Buicks for newspaper ads. She misunderstood perspective and composition, and she chose subjects poorly.

On the other hand, her work was very popular with people in the area because she, along with a guy named Al Cornett, was a scarce commodity. They were the only artists within miles.

Al’s work is better but still not good.

Actually, man who made quasi-pornographic sculptures lived about 50 yards from my grandparents, and his work is in the Smithsonian. His name was Edgar Tolson. I wouldn’t want any of that stuff in my house.

He carved anatomically-correct figures of Adam and Eve in the buff. He also did carvings that lacked genitalia. I guess it would be okay to have one of those. Antiques Roadshow appraised one of his pieces for $2,000-$3,000, so he’s not up there with Picasso.

I think the fuss over Tolson’s work is sort of like the reverse racism of soft expectations, applied to white people. If he had lived in New York, his work would all be in landfills.

My grandparents had some Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett prints in their house, and I didn’t get any of them when they died. My sister glommed at least one Cornett print and utterly destroyed it. I had never seen an art print stained with black mold until she got ahold of it. I would guess my aunt glommed the others while glomming things for her kids without going through the will or probate or my grandparents’ wishes. But I’m not sure.

My grandparents had a painting called “Kentucky the Great State;” a title which was not intended to be sarcastic. It wasn’t good, but I used to sleep in the bedroom where it hung, so I want a copy.

I have Ebay set up to send me Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett items, and it sent me a listing for a painting of Natural Bridge. This is a bridge created by erosion, and it is located in the Red River Gorge, near my grandparents’ town.

It’s one of her better works, meaning it’s good enough for a post card. It has what looks to be a wormy chestnut frame. It wasn’t expensive. I got the seller down to $42 plus shipping. I took it.

We plan to clean it up and put it in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It’s good enough for kids and guests. I already have one of her paintings in the guest toilet.

I have given up on Eastern Kentucky as a place to live or visit. The culture is just not up to par. The childishness, racism, violence, machismo, drunkenness, ignorance, spousal abuse, and so on are too much for me to deal with, and I would also find it awkward to live near my relatives who have pretty much rejected me in favor of bits of my grandparents’ estates. I’m also bummed out because so many people there are conservative in their hearts yet vote for Democrats so the government will give them money.

Nonetheless, I have very fond memories of Kentucky, and I often think about what it could be if the people would just grow up.

I hope the painting is in good shape when it arrives. Now I have to install a dishwasher.

The new dishwasher is “smart.” Notice the quotation marks. Bosch expects me to use an app to set it up and use it. I can do it without the app, but then I lose elite features. I won’t be able to set a delayed start, and I won’t be able to change the dishwasher’s gender.

I’ll bet that smart junk added $75 to the MSRP.

I wonder when we’ll get over the smart idiocy and resume making appliances that make sense.

Anyway, here’s to our mechanical and electronic slaves. Thank you, God, because I don’t have to wash clothes or dishes by hand, travel on foot or on a cart, take cold showers, or accept the climate nature gave me. I appreciate it more than I can say.

Daddy is Pleased

I saw a lovely video from Mike “Mike with the Mic” McCarthy today. He’s a brave soul who goes to public places in Australia and holds signs with “JESUS” and related verbiage on them.

Australia is not a friendly place for Christians now. Christianity is in sharp decline, with a minority now identifying as Christian. Perversion is one of the main drivers of the decline.

As God predicted to me, and I repeated, many years ago, homosexuality has turned out to be the club Satan uses to beat Christians.

I don’t know a lot about McCarthy, but his videos show him being abused by various people, ranging from atheists to homosexuals to, oddly, Maoris. Maoris are from New Zealand, which is almost a thousand miles from Australia at the closest point.

As far as I can tell, McCarthy does not yell at people or provoke them in any way.

The cops show up over and over and tell him he’s the problem. In one amusing video, they tell him he’s obstructing pedestrian traffic as dozens of pedestrians walk past unimpeded.

I wanted to repost a video in which a trans lunatic approaches him for no reason and starts screaming irrationally.

Of course, I use the word “trans” as a convenience. There are no transgender or transsexual people. There are only the demonized, the confused, and the attention-starved.

And there are real Trans, from Vietnam.

On a related not, the percentage of American college students identifying as trans has dropped by something like 40% since 2025, which means a lot of young women had their healthy breasts sliced off and burned as waste, and also had themselves skinned to manufacture false penises, in order to get attention and admiration.

What do you do now that your arm and leg are covered with skin grafts, your breasts are gone, and your genitals are ruined? There is no reset button for that.

It would take a very, very unusual type of man to fall in love with a girl like that and marry her. It is beyond sad.

“Trans” men are more likely to keep their bodies intact, because many joined the movement in order to gain access to women’s private areas so they could enjoy voyeurism and rape.

Here is the video:

Clearly, this man does not dress or act like a woman. His speech is a little effeminate, but that’s about it. And he is utterly deranged. He raves about the Christian lady holding the camera raping elders in their sleep, whatever that means. He says, “We’re not your fuzzy angels!” He says, “I’m married to daddy.”

Watch the whole thing.

This is demon-possessed behavior at its peak. Consuming rage. Complete detachment from reality.

What does “I’m married to daddy” mean? Is daddy the main demon who inhabits him?

These are the people who are going to come for us. This is the kind of person who shot Donald Trump, Cory Imperatore, David Dutch, and Charlie Kirk. Candace Owens is on her way to becoming such a person.

The man in the video shows what happens as people approach the final stages of demon control. It’s a progressive thing, pun not intended but appropriate.

The trans business is a tool Satan uses to separate people from reason. It’s like the little thin tool you slip under the case of your phone when you take it apart to replace the battery. The process starts with a tiny crack, and then your mind is opened up like a trash chute door, allowing no end of filth and derangement to enter.

Be watchful of your trans acquaintances, along with all the TDS sufferers you know. They may be relatively peaceful now, but they are sleepers who will one day be mustered against you.

I thank God they have been so slow to embrace firearms. But that’s coming, as Tyler Robinson, the actual and sole Charlie Kirk shooter, proves. He and Audrey Hale and the rest.